HITS

Animation, live action, scripted TV, reality programs, music, and other content creation efforts all center on traditional development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution activities.

Enjoyment, and monetization occur at the end of the process. Over many decades major innovation came in terms of color, sound, cameras, and digitalization. The recent pandemic has accelerated workflow improvement in the areas of cloud compute, storage, and production teams working at home and across the world.

But there is more to come on both the innovation and improvement fronts.

Improvement will continue to come related to industry anthologies, platform adoption, security advances, cost-effective data storage, remote compute, file movement, content transmission, and other necessary creation-anywhere cornerstones. But more important is how will technology innovation change the way stories and music are created.

It’s not enough to simply take old production processes and place them in the cloud.

That is just improvement. With all the digital innovation technology capabilities at our fingertips we must follow Steve Jobs’ mandate: “Think different.”

CREATIVE PROCESS AND IMPROVEMENT

Improvement: Make something that already exists better. Let’s take a look at storytelling as part of the overall media creation and consumption process. Songwriters have an idea. They combine music and words to turn that idea into a story/convey a message. The listener feels an emotion and likes or dislikes.

Typically, a movie, TV show, or video comes from an idea that is greenlit, and then teams of creators and talent are assembled, and the final product is created and distributed to the viewer.That’s very much a creative process where there’s a starting point to the process that comes to an end before consumption, revenue, and enjoyment begins.

This traditional process allows for little to no interaction from the creators to the consumer, until the magical distribution barrier is reached.

Our industry has been focused on taking the age-old creation workflow process and adding technology, for the most part, to improve existing processes, but never innovating the underlying storytelling creative process. Color was innovative. Sound was innovative. Both of these capabilities were new and had never been done before.

Very much a creative process where there is a starting point to the process that comes to an end before consumption, revenue, and enjoyment begins.This traditional process allows for little or no interaction from the creators to the consumer until the magical distribution barrier is reached.

Our industry has been focused on taking the age-old creation workflow process and adding technology for the most part to improve existing processes, but not innovating the underlying storytelling creative process. Color was innovative. Sound was innovative.

Both of these capabilities were new and had never been done before.

Today’s improvement in our creative industry deals with some of the following: what cloud provider or providers should the industry use, what editing toolset(s) are best, what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology is the best to reduce latency, how do we implement better security, how can files be compressed and moved around the globe, how much security is enough, how can artificial intelligence be added to monitor the process, and how can production costs decrease?

CREATIVE PROCESS AND INNOVATION

Innovation: Make something new.How we can use technology to drive innovation, not just improvement?

Let’s suppose we want to include the viewer/consumer in the creative process, and remove media enjoyment from the end of the process, and instead make the viewer part of that process.

Let’s move enjoyment from a sort of passive experience to an interactive creation experience.

Along the way we can make storytelling not one-size-fits-all, but more of a tailored viewer experience (which can also create new revenue streams).

Didn’t like the way “Game of Thrones” ended? Don’t worry, you can make your own ending. Or endings!What would an innovative interactive workflow look like?

Maybe we need an Interactive Media Creation Platform, IMCP (we have to have a three- or four-letter acronym … it’s part of the technology business). Here is how it would work. First a basic story is conceived. Take for instance a western story set in a galaxy far, far away.

The story-line is established, production and talent teams are assembled and production begins. Consumers can subscribe to the “dailies” via the IMCP, feed-back can be discussed in Facebook- or Zoom-type chat rooms around the world, characters and scenes could be created or changed in minutes based upon CGI technology, alternative story-lines could be conceived, new live-action scenes could be shot the next day, the direction and production staff could take this input into consideration and proceed with the original story-line or move the direction of the content to new horizons based upon the interaction.

New content could also be localized based upon global input.

Another way the IMCP could be used is at the end of the creation process. All of the artifacts and simits of the production that end up on the virtual cutting room floor could be placed within the editing section of the IMCP thereby allowing the consumer to make their own movies, or content.

The user and fan community could create a new partial movie, short Quibi type content, or full-length movie based upon the original extras, CGI created video, and then publish it within part of the IMCP for friends and the public at large.

Fees could be charged for this engagement process, and also to view the new content. Revenue could go back to the original content rights owners.

All of this interaction would be based upon technology and tools we have at our fingertips such as: social media interactive sites, group collaboration room technology, cloud-based content editing and publishing tools, and common device, mouse, swiping, and typing skills.

So, the challenge has been thrown down for innovation over improvement.

Who will join this quest? IMCP… coming soon to a desktop, tablet, or phone near you.

* By Jeff Caldwell, VP, Digital Integration, Cloud Partners, ATMECS

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